Whose Life Is This, Anyway?

By James Atlas; James Atlas is an editor of The New York Times Magazine; he is at work on a biography of Saul Bellow.

Published: January 13, 1991

Correction Appended

I was a student of Richard Ellmann's at Oxford in the early 1970's, and spent many afternoons in his gloomy, cavernous study at New College, working my slow way through "Finnegans Wake." Lost in the maze of Joyce's hermetic "night language," I would stare at the row of pale-green Dublin phone books on the shelf behind Ellmann's desk and speculate about what made him so . . . Joycean. Outwardly the eminent biographer of Joyce could hardly have been more different from his subject. Joyce was, in his own words, "a small man, prone to alcoholism"; Ellmann was a moderate drinker and a rather bulky man, with a balding brow and a flat Midwestern accent that years of dining at High Table with murmurous Oxford dons had failed to mitigate. Maybe it was his effortless fidelity to his own nature that made him such a shrewd interpreter of others. Ellmann treated his subjects -- William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde -- with a benign, avuncular tolerance. He noted, and forgave, their failings. Even the title of his biographical essays on the major modernists, "Golden Codgers" -- the phrase is from Yeats -- reflected his affection for the writers to whom he devoted his life. Ellmann was drawn to genius, yet was himself an ordinary man -- the Leopold Bloom of biography.

What made Ellmann's biography of Joyce the masterpiece that it is? Not every great writer earns a great biography. Hemingway has been ill-served by Carlos Baker and Kenneth S. Lynn, among others. Joseph Conrad lies crushed beneath the weight of Frederick Karl's tombstone-sized biography, while J. R. Ackerley, a minor literary journalist in the London of the 1940's, has been resurrected in Peter Parker's marvelous biography. Who reads the works of Baron Corvo now? We read the work of his biographer, A. J. A. Symons (himself the subject of an excellent biography by his brother, Julian). What matters, in the end, is how passionately the biographer responds to the life he's writing about, how deeply it taps into his own preoccupations. "A good biography is prompted not by the inherent qualities of its subject," argued Julian Symons in his introduction to his brother's book "The Quest for Corvo," "but by the biographer's unconsciously realized opportunity for self-expression." In Joyce, Ellmann found a subject who elicited his own gifts.

Biography requires a certain reticence. The biographer's job is to stay in the background, behind the scenes -- like Flaubert's ideal narrator, "everywhere present and nowhere visible." But of course the biographer is visible -- in the selection of letters, documents and testimony from which he fashions his narrative; in his organization of this data; in the interpretation he puts on it; above all, in whom he chooses to write about.

Sometimes the choice appears obvious, a matter of shared gender, sexual preference or ethnic origin. Not only do white men write about white men, but blacks often write about blacks (Arnold Rampersad on Langston Hughes); homosexuals write about homosexuals (Edmund White's forthcoming biography of Jean Genet); married couples write about married couples (Edmund Morris on Theodore Roosevelt, Sylvia Morris on Edith Roosevelt). Geography can also play a part: Ruth Miller, one of Saul Bellow's biographers, grew up in Chicago; Richard Lingeman, the latest biographer of Theodore Dreiser, is from his subject's home state of Indiana. So can educational background: Carol Gelderman, we learn from the author's note to her biography of Mary McCarthy, "was born in Detroit and, like Mary McCarthy, educated for a time by the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart." (Is even physiognomy a factor? In her photograph on the book jacket, Ms. Gelderman looks like Mary McCarthy.)

What's harder to establish is the latent affinity, the private significance that a biographer finds in someone else's life. "The real elements of self-identification are much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks," writes Richard Holmes, whose own biographies of Coleridge and Shelley are such powerful "hauntings" -- to use his own word -- of other peoples' lives. Biographers themselves don't really know how they choose their subjects, any more than a poet knows how a particular image came into his head. "Why Harry Crosby?" asks Geoffrey Wolff apropos of "Black Sun," his biography of the upper-crust Bostonian whose debauchery and suicide formed a minor chapter of Paris literary life in the 1920's. As a Princeton undergraduate, Mr. Wolff read about Crosby in Malcolm Cowley's "Exile's Return," he writes in an essay in "Telling Lives"; "his story stuck in my mind." No special reason: "It's interesting," he declares with italicized belligerence. "Things that are interesting interest me."

But why, Mr. Wolff? Why do they interest you? "I don't see the connections between the things I write," he confesses. "It wasn't until I'd written 'Black Sun' and 'The Duke of Deception' that someone pointed out to me that I'd written about two people who reinvented themselves."

Correction: January 13, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Because of an editing error, an essay about biography in The New York Times Book Review today, under the headline "Choosing a Life," refers incorrectly in some copies to Robert A. Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Caro was born in Manhattan; his father emigrated from Poland. Because of an editing error, an essay last Sunday about biography ("Choosing a Life") referred incorrectly in some copies to Robert A. Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Caro was born in Manhattan; his father was an immigrant from Poland.